The Besties - Cairn Is a Climbing Game for the Real Ones

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Climbing games have become a trend over the past few years, ranging from the AAA mountains of Death Stranding to the indie polygonal crags of Peak. But no climbing game has been as loyal to the actual physical experience of ascending cold, hard rock as Cairn. The guys report on their time on the cliffs. Plus, Plante shares his feelings about the brilliant adventure game, Perfect Tides: Station to Station. You can hear more about that game in Plante’s recent interview with its creator, Meredith Gran. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I'll tell you the problem for me. And it is honestly, sort of a deal breaker because I don't like a lot of mess, you know? You're a clean boy. Yeah, I don't like having stuff on me, right? And so all the chalk while playing cairn, it's getting all over my raw guy L. IX. It's getting all over my pants. It's getting all over my couch. It's getting freaking everywhere.

I don't know why the game comes with a big bag of chalk and says you have to do, you have to have this on you play it. Yeah, I also didn't appreciate that it came in like writing chalk for it. It didn't come powder. It didn't come like LeBron James. You got to squish it up yourself. Exactly. It's like, why do it that way? Why do it? Why do it at all? I think I know what went wrong here. You, so you're actually only supposed to use the chalk on your hands. You're not supposed to fully disrobe and cover your entire body in chalk. Okay, see, that's the, okay, so that's the, I've never climbed a rock before, guys. I'm I supposed to know.

I know. I think I was watching, just recently, I was watching the live. Free climbing, what is his name? Alex Harnold was climbing. Honnold. Arnold was climbing the mountain. Yeah. And, or the building.

Not a mountain. The building. So you didn't watch this at all. I want to be really clear. I was watching it and he used his butt crack at one point to leverage a windowsill. Yes. And I guarantee that Bukkrak had at least a little bit of chalkiness. A little bit.

Maybe a touch of Gold Bond. A scosh. A scosh of gold bond. To get that extra grip. You got to sometimes. Yep. And also, wintry, prouetery freshness. Feels great.

Gotta be real. I'm not caring for this conversation. No. No. No. No. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Fraswick. I know the best game of the week. Justin got pulled into his toilet, into Narnat. But this week, welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest and home interactive intergame. It's a game of the year club. And just by listening, my friend, you have become a member.

I hope that you are staying safe and warm. We've got a game for you that is maybe not the best for. for feeling safe and warm. Is a game about being quite cold and in peril. And hungry and in peril and thirsty. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and give it the Besties Award

for Worst Imaginable Game to play while iced into your house with your two children. It is Cairn. Hey, Chris Plant, what's Cairn? Some people are calling it the latest Strand game. I'm calling it a climbing,

bouldering, rock climbing, simulation. You put one foot and one hand in front of the other and you go up a mountain. It's as simple as that. Not quite as uh, fottie-esque as some other climbing games we've been playing, but we'll talk about all of that and more. But still very, very, very funny when you fall down off the mountain. We'll talk about all that and more with Karen after the short break. Okay, so Karen is a mountain game. You are climbing a mountain. You are a expert climber and you've got all... And kind of a butt-holt. whole. I will say. Ava, I think, is a great character, but kind of hugely unlikable for quite a bit of the game. But I will admit that, like, having watched Free Solo, the documentary about Alex

Honnold, I think that's kind of part and parcel with the activity. Yeah, there's something, the game is a real love letter to bouldering, rock climbing, the whole world. There is a sort of detachment that one must possess in order to become a rock climbing weirdo? You need to not be worried about the pain that you would inflict on others because your passion is so great. Shumongous selfishness. Thank you, Russ. I think that's what we're all going to be dancing around.

I think if you heard the description and even, I think, if you played 30 minutes of the game, you would say it's baby steps, but with double the attachments, it's baby steps with hands, It's baby hands, baby feet. Only not really humorous in nature. And I think that that is, I don't know, I had a pretty negative first reaction to this game. It honestly was not until I started to go up the mountain and get into the rhythm of it that I felt like,

okay, I get what this thing is doing and what this thing is doing is actually pretty cool. It has grown on me. That's true. I think it overwhelms very early on because it's presenting you with pretty, tough just like mechanics within the first five minutes of like use your peaton and use the grip and make sure you're filling up your thirst meter or whatever it is but i do think it uh you get there

let's kick in to that like like literally the moment to the moment it's weirdly almost closer to quop the other benept body game where you control each different appendage with a button here they've tied you can cycle between your two two hands and your two feet. In fact, you have to. I don't think there's a way to control two limbs at the same time. No, no, no, no, I don't think so. And there is an auto mode. So you don't have to be like making sure, like, okay, do I want to use my right arm or my left arm? And it recommends the auto mode where it's picking what is probably the best appendage to move at that time. Yes, I think it is the way it weighs. There's so much stuff going on under the, the, the climbing mechanics of this game are the fucking star of the show. I feel like, clearly the thing that, like, the most thought. and effort went into. And it really is an accomplishment because it is weighing so much stuff all the time.

Like it's not just enough for you to have your hands and feet both like pretty well embedded, you know, in like a nice grip. As you're climbing the mountain, you'll see little outcoves and little cracks and you've got to really look at that stuff and figure out. Love those cracks. Because they're just an easy little path for you to follow.

But also like if your legs are twisted up or like if your butt is sticking out too far. Like there's a lot of kind of physics calculations that are taking place. And Trudeau's sort of the genre, you have a certain amount of endurance as you are finding these lines and trying to figure out where to put your hands

and where to put your feet as you climb Mount Kami. And if you run out of endurance, you can kind of shake it off once or twice, but then you are going to fall unless you put a peaton down. But you can run out of petons, which brings us to the sort of economy of the game, which I am way more mixed.

on than just the straight rock climbing of it. Yeah. So you are, there is a whole survival element to this game. In addition to the climbing and measuring stamina, you're also making sure your hunger meter is filled up. If you don't do that, then it's going to impact your stamina and your ability to grip, etc. Same thing with water. Same thing with, I think rest is one of them.

Is that correct? You remember? I don't know, man. Regardless, you have to. Most of that stuff off pretty quick. You fill a bag very early on. You have like starting equipment that you find. And you've got water bottles and bars and things like that.

You can cook. You can mix items together. And you can also find stuff in the wild. So I found some raspberries. I found like a little spout that was giving out water from the rock. Filled up my gear. And you got to make sure that stuff balances. Now, early on, very early on, maybe the first thing you decide is how you want to play this game.

And the second that I knew that there was. was intense survival mechanics. I was like, no, thank you. And opted out. It's just, it's interesting. The stuff that they are doing with that is interesting. It is like, it incentivizes you to be playing the game in a certain way, looking for alcoves and little caves.

And you're sort of exploring kind of an abandoned mountain village as you're kind of climbing up and you're finding supplies from them. You're finding straight up dead mountain climbers. and kind of getting their resources. Which like score, by the way. Yeah, it's a sweet score. But like that stuff all on top of just the moment to moment, I think incredibly strong, satisfying,

honestly kind of puzzly mountain climbing of trying to find your path and keeping it all balanced. I feel like it's just a hat on a hat a little bit. And it was not, I don't know, I turned it off after a couple of hours because it just felt like it was making me want to not play the thing, making me not want to, making me want to stop playing the game fully,

even though I was really enjoying sort of the climbing aspect of it. So you can turn that stuff off. To use Baby Steps as a comparison, and I'm not saying one is better than the other. But Babyseps has these other alternative routes, or you can even go down in a different direction, right? You can go see a pool, or you can go intentionally off an edge and find a new path.

Or you can not. Like you can just keep going up. You can create that challenge for yourself. When you have this mode on, it is weirdly encouraging you to consider going back down to get other things. So you'll climb up the side of a mountain, right? And that feels like the core of the game. And then you will while climbing see a bees nest and be like, oh, once I get to the top, I could plant my peaton or pylon or whatever and repel down into that cave. game. I had always heard peaton.

Sure. Sure. It's a region. And go for it. But you also, in doing that, you might fall and lose not just the effort that you made, but like more supplies and more energy. So, yeah, I, I get it. It reminds me, like, death trending one in some ways of, like.

It is way more punishing the death journey one. I don't want to, like, spend too much longer because I think we all agree that the survival stuff is unnecessary and kind of detracts from the overall experience. unless you're like a hardcore person, but we're not. And so I think it's... And I think the game builds well enough tension without the kind of like survival aspects.

The main thing that you are doing in this game, and I think it is something you do more even than in a peak or in a baby steps is like routing out where you are going to go. Yeah. Sometimes while exploring the world, you'll find a map. And the map has been drawn by another mountain climber, and it will show you kind of potential lines

and their respective difficulty settings. That's great. When you find one of those, you're like, oh, fuck, yeah. Because otherwise, like, you're going to roll up to the next sheer rock face and go into, like, the, you know, wide angle view mode that you have and just kind of look at it for a long time

until you say, okay, I think I see where I can get up there. Because otherwise, you may get halfway up a face and you've spent 15 minutes trying to, like, get up there. And then the thing just dead ends, and you're like, fuck, But even that, like, you can have cool, very emergent moments where, like, you put a Pitan in and you repel and you just kind of swing over to the other track, making sort of like a desperate jump. Like, that stuff is so good. They crushed it. That shit is so, so good.

I keep coming back to play the game because it is really, really, really satisfying to get up over a thing. Yeah. I think initially I was put off by the AI controlling, like deciding what limb you do. Right. But I do think that the way it was built, you sort of have to do that because it's not visually always the most obvious thing of like where your weight is at any given moment. So having the AI sort of take command of that and say like, oh, you really should be moving your left hand now because there's no weight on your left hand is I think a requirement. But there are moments where there's a few mechanics in here that I think work really well. you get to moments where you have to like reach up.

And to do that, it'll mean like going on one tippy toe to reach up your hand and be in a very precarious situation for like a second or two before you have to. And you're really committing to it because you can't really go back down once you push yourself up like that. Yeah. So you make these interesting choices like that that I think feel really good. You just have to like accept the fact that baby steps we keep going back to it is a game where every footstep is like you deciding exactly where your foot's going to be at any given moment. And this, you do, it does require

a little bit of finesse. Yeah. I really like that. One suggestion I definitely have is not a difficulty toggle. I don't think. It's just like a gameplay setting you can turn on is feedback on, like, good foot placement. So like if you, with that setting on while you're climbing up, If you, like, get your foot on, like, a nice foot hold and it's, like, pretty locked in. A little, like, square will appear when you do it. Otherwise, like, no thing appears. And if you have, like, a couple of limbs that don't have good placement, your stamina just, like, vanishes. Your stamina also is not a meter that is on the screen.

It is, you see Ava's arm, like, start to shake and legs start to shake. And the screen starts to darken. Yeah, you get rumble feet back. And you know, like, okay, I can shake this off. And then maybe I need to decide whether or not to put a pitton down. Now you're saying Pitten. I mean, that's what they say in the game, right? I don't like, I've seen Free Solo.

I watch some of the thing. I think this world is really fucking interesting. I always think it's really interesting when there exists, and I think pretty esoteric, athletic endeavor that there is so much like, so many strats about. Sometimes I'll get like, I'm friends, I'm buddies with somebody who's like, about that life. And we'll share, like, clips of somebody just doing like a bouldering.

tournament where they're like one foot off the ground trying to like find exactly where to put their fingers on this weird dodecahedron to like get up it or like trying to climb a two foot high rock wall just like with these little tiny I think that stuff's really cool and this is a game about that and I think a lot of care and attention went into sort of courting that community I have to imagine this is this is something that people who actually rock climb would would enjoy because it was made by those people yeah it feels very much targeted to them it's also so different than peak in baby steps and all these other climbing games in that way too and that those games are about moving up but basically everything is a ladder you're always climbing just chaos one hand in front of

the other this is really you might want to watch some of a video of people doing free climbing just to get an idea of what it is supposed to look like because you're wedging yourself in weird positions to create that balance it is not unusual for you to be almost horizontal at points as you are making your way between, let's say, like a V-shaped crevice of the mountain. If you try to just go straight up, you will fall because the gravity is against you at that. Which isn't to say that like the physics and the like animations don't get a little bit janky at times because they definitely do.

And that's okay. That's fine. But I've also seen it a number of times like get janky and then see it actually correct in a way that seems like a human body would do. It's really, I think that stuff is a technical kind of huge achievement. There's some design issues. The writing is a bit so, so for me. There's scenes that have been like pretty great,

but I don't know that there's a whole lot of development. I don't feel particularly attached to the lead character, mostly because I think she does feel this kind of like standoffish, not standoffish, but kind of isolated, individualistic kind of person, which is, I don't know, kind of tough to root for. But then again, I also think they are doing something with that that I just haven't gotten to in the story. Maybe it's like a long, what is that, a short hike where at the end you just have like a very

meaningful, sad call and everything is fixed. Yeah, I don't want that. I don't, I genuinely don't. Around the like three or so hour mark, I feel like the game introduces what feels like a, I don't know, an arc. And I think I'm sort of getting to the resolution a little bit. It's hard for me to tell where I'm at on this fucking mountain

because you look straight up and it looks like you're close. And then, oh. Yeah, they do a lot of false peak stuff. I do want to share an anecdote. So I was talking to, we've mentioned him a few times. Bennett Fadi, who created quop and baby steps. And I mentioned to him, like, my initial reaction to this game is not very positive. And apparently he is, like, fully into it, incredibly engaged with it.

But specifically mentioned that he's been playing it in free solo mode, which maybe shouldn't surprise anyone. Yes. The hardest difficulty. And he says he's got about 40 hours into it, and he's only about two-thirds of the way up the mountain. So if you want to make it last, you could make yourself miserable like Manifati. but I think for most people probably turning off most of the survival stuff is the way to go.

Free solo mode, by the way, a mode that exists in the game where you don't get ropes and you do not get pitons or pitons. It is just you and it is permadeath. Yeah. So if you fall, you're done. That's cool, guys.

That's great. That's fucking in there and available. There's going to be some speed run travesties that are done to this game and I'm very, very excited to see those. The other thing I wanted to mention if you're interested in this, but you feel like it's too simi or whatever.

We had mentioned this game a while ago. I forget it was on Resties or Besties, but the game was White Knuckle, which was a first-person climbing game with like one-bit graphics. That is like a very arcadey approach to this idea, but still has things about like your hand strength

and things like that are still factored in, but much more like short runs and things like that. But I really liked it. What's your guys take away on Karen? Do you think you're going to stick with it as we move on to the next game? I think it is starting to get way too competitive for games that I like sort of like but aren't like I'm not totally in love with. Yeah, sure.

To stay with it much more than I have, I'm several hours in. I've enjoyed it. It did start clicking with me in ways that I wasn't expecting, but not necessarily in ways that like death stranding to hit. Yeah, sure. We're all able to get it to run on Steam Deck? I'm playing it on Rog Ally X. It struggles a bit. It doesn't do, it has some hiccups.

I think for the most part it runs pretty simple. I mean, we are at the territory where like an open world 3D game probably is going to have a tough time on Steam Deck pretty consistently. I couldn't get to start and I didn't know if it was just an issue with my Steam Deck. And that's like the bummer is this is the sort of game that I think I would put a lot of time in if I could. play it basically before sleep. I love a game like this. I love a game that is all about just the flow and the feel and I can tink with

the settings and just like be in that space. Sure. Just stranding one. But it would be very hard for me to like commit to it if I'm going to be stuck to my computer when I'm playing it. It is an okay game to play in front of children for the most part so long as you don't

Not if you're taping up your grody fingers. Yeah, fair. But they should know about that. Your fingers can get all torn up and then you got a bandage But then again, you can turn off finger mode so you don't have to look at it at all. Fingers that have been put through an absolute meat grinder. I think it's cool.

I think it's really, really cool. And there are a few things I wish it had done differently. Game Bakers is the developer of this, which is, I don't think I've played one of their games since Squids and Squids Wild West, which are some fucking banger old app store gyms. Yeah, I think I played Fury. They made Fury.

Yeah, that was pretty good. That was the last one. I think it's really cool. I think it's great. I think I'm, if I am as close to finishing it as I think I am, I will probably keep going. But then again, if I play it this afternoon, I climb up and then all of a sudden there's... Yeah, there's going to be probably another mountain. Yeah, maybe.

It'll be like a symphony of the night. It'll be an upside-down mountain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn, that would be cool, actually. Parachute in. That would be sick. Anyway, that's Karen. Let's take a break and then talk about another game if that's okay.

Cool. The game we're talking about in our B segment is Pirates of the Caribbean Strange Tides. I don't know why Chris Plant has brought a... I'm a matey. I'm ready to be canceled. It's good stuff. Hey, I want to tell you about Perfect Tides Station to Station. Have either of you had a chance to play this game yet? No, I haven't.

No, I haven't not either. That's great. Then I can tell you all about it. So Perfect Tides Station to Station is actually the sequel to a game called Perfect Tides. It is an adventure series. They are more or less memoir games. They are about a fictional young woman named Mara, but they are like pretty clearly inspired by the life of the game's creator Meredith Grant. You also might know her as the creator and author of the comic Octopus Pie.

It was a browser comic many, many years ago. But this game, it is set in the year 2003 in the magical land of Manhattan, and you are Mara as a freshman in college. This is interesting to me because I was a freshman in college in the magical land of Manhattan in 2004. So it feels like I am literally transported back to a very specific moment in a very specific place. Narrow cast it to Chris Plant. profoundly in that fresh not every place in this is explicitly named what it is in real life but like when you keep going to your friend's apartment in this game when you were like hey i want to go get food your options will be the selica when you want to go see a movie it is the second avenue old yiddish

movie theater. It is full of recreations of a lot of places that don't even exist anymore, like the High Line before it got turned into the High Line. There are moments in the game where you go up on the elevated subway tracks that have since been converted into a very famous park. It is truly a time capsule of a video game. But like that alone doesn't make it great. What makes it great is the writing here is exceptional. And even though it looks like a kind of pixel point and click adventure game, it does its best to cut all of the things that are annoying about that genre so that you can just focus on the story. So you're not doing the like, I need a find bubble gum and a rupeer bottle and that's going to help me solve the puzzle.

You're largely just living the life of this young woman over the course of four seasons and experiencing really three big relationships. in her life along with what is going on with her mother and her grandmother. And that's it. Like it is really that simple. It is a year in a person's life, the video game. But the writing is so good and so powerful that it pulls you through like reading a really great novella. Is it, uh, is there like player choice, I guess?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So there is the. The game itself is very authored. So, like, every day, you're going to experience the story that the game has. Like, you're not going to be able to choose who your boyfriend is or anything like that.

But you also manage your time. So how you spend your time during that day is up to you. You can decide what book you want to read each day. You can, like, literally go to the library. You can buy books from a street vendor. You can trade them with friends. and doing those things will increase Mara's stats, like her knowledge of music or anarchy or sex.

And then you can apply your stats to your- Knowledge of anarchy. I know. You acquire different skills. And then you can apply that to your writing. So then when you go to write papers, which are kind of the goals of each season, I guess, you will want to combine wherever you're like best,

are. So if you've been reading a whole lot about music in the city, you would want to write an essay about music in the city. If you're writing a lot about sex in the city, you would want to write sex in the city, baby. You're going to be rich. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it sounds a little disco elizium in the way that kind of ideas would take root and become kind of mechanics. Yes, but with zero sticks. Where disc orlesium is like, you could. die at any moment and all that. This is like, yeah, you might fail. Well, not even fail. You'll do poorly on a paper and you'll get a different reaction from your teacher if you chose a really bad match. Or you might not impress a blog editor that you're trying to impress things like that. But really,

all of that is there largely to give you just a little bit of mechanical, you know, zip in your brain. that way you are pulled through the story. What it wants you to do is just kind of sign on for the ride, right? And go from scene to scene and meet all these characters. And really explore the world. So you can kind of touch and engage with anything in the world. I say touch. I mean, you can get a description for pretty much everything that you see.

So it is this little diorama almost of these places in this person's life where you can ask like, hey, why is there an X versus Sever poster in this apartment? And if you click on it, you'll get six paragraphs explaining X versus sever and why someone would steal that standee from their shitty movie theater job and Long Island and carry it all the way to the East Village as a goof. I fucking love the way this game looks, man. It looks. Can you describe like the general visual style?

Yeah, it is something that I feel like is. not often captured in, you know, modern pixel art games, this, like, kind of brief period of, I think about like Sega CD pixel games, right? Or it's not, like, necessarily constrained to any particular hardware limitations. And so the pixel art looks a bit more cartoony. It is giving me kind of Willie Beamish vibes if that tracks for anyone. It's giving

weird South Park kind of vibes a little bit in just like the art and the songs. Scott Pilgrim beat him up. Yeah, for sure. I think that, well no, even that I think, you know,

Hughes pretty close to that kind of what, tribute games. Sure. Kind of high-deaf, high-detail stuff. This is, this is, this is not really that.

It looks like a, I don't know, like a PC game from 1994 or something like that, like in that weird transitional period. But it's like really cool. It's so expressive and just really, really well drawn. I also think like if you are a fan of point-and-click adventure games, even though it trips away a lot of the mechanics, it's doing some interesting things with how it tells story, using that system. So like in a lot of the old LucasArts games

you have that omniscient narrator who is kind of like holier than now or a lot of smarter, cleverer than Guy Bers 3P would. What's weird with this is you're playing this game where Mara is the author.

Like this is her most of her life, not one to one, but it's her. And then the narrator feels like Meredith Grand today. Like it feels like somebody who knows what's going to happen in life, right? So you are kind of this third party and watching somebody argue with their younger self

and sometimes the younger person is actually right. You know, it's like, we weren't total morons when we were kids. But being in that dynamic is unlike anything that you get in a book. It feels like very local to what you can pull off in a video game. Yeah.

It's so good. Also, just the vibe just very quickly of like so capturing that weird moment when you are in your early 20s and you are both like a kid and adult at the same time. And like in a moment you'll be like talking with a crush on the phone falling asleep. And then you'll be listening to neutral milk hotel on the subway. I think you're having the most profound experience of your life. And the next moment you'll be buying condoms for the first time. And then the moment after that, you'll be like having to take your. grandma to the hospital or something, you know, like...

Sort of just a sashimi plate of slices of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a spread. It's a charcutory, if you will. I love it. I will definitely want to check this out. What are you playing it on? Is it?

You can play it on PC or Mac. It works perfectly well on a MacBook Air, so you don't need, like, a whole bunch of power to run this thing. And I believe it is coming to Switch later this year. Okay. Cool. Very cool. So we want to do some mail?

Yeah, we have some reader mail. We had this letter from J-Man 1980. We had this letter from J-Man 1980 about the game genie. We're asking how the game genie works, if you remember. This is what J-Man wrote. The game genie just intercepts memory reads rights between the game and the console. The codes are actually just memory address and values. So the game genie people find out where in the system memory,

Dick Tracy's health is. And then every time the game tries to reduce Dick Tracy's health, the game genius is like, I got you. But then when the game asks what Dick Tracy's health is from the system memory, the game genius is like, it's 100. And then the game is like, you sure? Okay, sounds good. So basically...

I mean, that's what we said, right? It's just a shunt. It basically is just it captures the electricity signals, changes them a little bit. Yeah, I do want to know what, like, how you find the, like, flying mode in Mario in the systems. Like I guess it is swimming versus not

basically in the code probably. Yeah. Something like that. I don't think we know enough about however S&S games were programmed to, but it's got to be in there somewhere Yeah, probably. Evan said that it's probably some understanding of the wishmaking process. Yeah. So that

could also be it. It's about visualization and manifestation. That's very huge for the game gene. Drew also wrote in to say that Fable will... Drew. Drew. Not freaking level 9,000. Yeah, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew Davenport.

Yeah. Put some respect on this man's name. Drew. Drew. Fabel will have office-style cutaways. Please devote 20 minutes in the next episode to talk about it. Without Justin here... That feels wrong.

Feels wrong. So we'll save the Fable talk. But I don't like that. You don't like it? As someone who is genetically kind of... have linked to Justin. I don't like that. Why?

I don't think it will be good. I don't think it will be good to have cutaways in the fable game. I think I know what would really get you, though. What's that? Office style cutaways, but they kind of make, like, you know, those, like, silly Monty Python-style jokes. I don't think, I don't think, it is so hard for humor to exist in a manner in which the game will stop and say here comes

and now and now here comes some humor it's like that's crazy guys I mean but Fable has that Fable's like a jockey game constantly Fable doesn't have the exact thing If Fable doesn't have a thing where like you pick up a chicken And then like the game stops and the main character looks at you and is like

Mmm extra crispy like Cacca doodle doo He's not fucking bubsy he's not geeks Like they're gexing it up I don't think it's gonna be constant I think it'll be during cut scenes. You'll, like, meet a big boss, and then the boss will be scary, and then it's going to cut away, and he'll be, like, a nerdy guy making trains.

That's my guess. Great. I mean, Conquer's Bad Furday did it. I don't know why. Did it? Yeah, probably. They did, like, two camera? Well, it didn't do, like, the documentary cutaway.

It didn't do documentary cutaway. That's fine. That's a big difference. The office did invent that. Yeah. Fable needs to fucking come out. Fable's make me anxious now. I mean, it's.

They released a lot of information. It does seem like it's actually happening. I know it came up during our predictions episode of whether it would happen or not. This is what I get for not being logged into a newsroom Slack channel all the time. I miss when they actually do come out and say Fables Real. They said some nonsense about like there being a thousand MPCs or whatever, which, whatever. Todd Howard has said that for a thousand years. We can't trust anything until the game is out.

Yeah, for sure. New rule. No trusting video games until they're out. I guess. Anybody play anything else? Well, I've been playing something that I can't talk about so we're not going to talk about that.

I will talk about the thing that I went to which was Taskmaster Live. Oh, how did you get tickets to that? Jesus Christ. I have some very nice friends that work at the town hall in New York City which is a very nice theater and I like them a whole lot

and I was able to sneak on in there and it was spectacular or it was so much fun. I was skeptical that they would manage to capture the spirit of the show that I've watched on YouTube many, many years in a live format. And it absolutely, just the charm and the chemistry between Greg and Alex through the roof. Is it a different cat? What is the format?

I know nothing about it. Yeah. So the first half of the show, the live shows at least, when they're touring, I think the tour just wrapped. At least for this time, they did a Q&A for the first half. and then in the second half, they just like turn it into like a mini episode of, probably a full-length episode of Taskmaster,

where they'll do partially people from the audience as members of the cast and partially like special guests. Just brought up at random or? They actually had tasks that the audience could complete to become a member. So one of the tasks was they handed out when everyone came in,

they handed out pieces of paper. And that piece of paper was used for a few different, different challenges to like make it up on stage. But one of them was make your best paper airplane in a minute and then throw it on stage and try to hit Alex in the head. Great. And whoever got closest basically one. And so, yeah, so they had three random people on stage who were like incredibly fun to watch. They were like perfect for that.

It can be a little awkward, I would imagine sometimes. But those three people that I saw was great. And then we had Alex Moffitt was there from S&L. and also Lisa Gilroy, who is a very talented improvist. And it was just like dynamite. Oh, and Jason Manzuka showed up at the end

and had like a little special guest on. Jesus Christ, that's so stacked that cast. That's crazy. Yeah, the night before was John Oliver and Seth Myers were the big guests. So pretty crazy. Yeah, the tickets tend to be very competitive.

So I would recommend go into the Taskmaster website to sign up to their mailing list if something is coming in your neighborhood. Amanda mentioned that they sold out Chicago in like two minutes. She was on a meeting with us when the tickets went on sale and she was like, sorry guys, I'm going to be a couple of minutes. Oh, they're gone. Like great, like instantaneously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was great. I was really enjoyed myself. Cool. I have been playing.

So we've started to stream playing video games individually, me and Justin and Travis on the Macquarie family YouTube channel and I am doing a new run of trial by Fieri, which is my randomized Zelda series. I've done Link to the Past. I've done Ocarina of Time. Both of those games that I know extraordinarily well and felt well equipped to handle a randomizer for. But we've had people ask for more of it. And so I was trying to figure out what to do next. And Majora's mask has been randomized. People have picked it apart to a degree where you can't do it. The problem is I don't fucking remember that game. Because I haven't played it.

I would struggle with normal Majora's Mask. Yes, absolutely. I am struggling in a major way because that is the game that I've been playing. Major's Mask 3D, specifically the Grezzo version that came out in 2014. I do think you're supposed to say Grezzo. Gretzo. Gretzo. You're also supposed to say Fierty, by the way.

Fierry. Gretzo Fieri. Yeah. Yeah, I've been playing it just honestly to freshen up because playing it again, for stream, randomized, like, you find the Gero, What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? I don't know. That was 12 years ago that I played this game.

There is a restoration mod that has been made for Majores Mask 3D specifically to address a few, you know, issues that people have with the game. Apparently they've fucked up Zora swimming pretty bad in the 3DS version. But there's a lot of like really great quality of life stuff in the 3DS version. Like, for instance, when you play the song of double time, you can jump to a specific hour. because in the original Majores mask like if you were waiting for the lady with the bomb bag on the first night in North Clock Town

you'd have to wait around until midnight and it took fucking forever and it was so boring like there's lots of quality of life stuff but now you're waiting wait you wait and then she's selling like a feather right? What?

No. Because it's randomized? Oh so yes I'm not playing the randomized I'm just playing true no no no I wouldn't spoil that I'm just playing traditional but yes that is how it will work once it is randomized as I will go through all the fucking

effort to reunite Cafe and Anjou, and then as the moon crashes into the world, it'll be like, here is, five rupees! Like, thanks, dude. Can you guarantee that it will be completable when you do the randomization? Yeah, so, I mean, this

stuff is really incredible. It is incredible how much these communities have been able to kind of reverse engineer these games. There is one for the 3DS version that I'm thinking about doing, but the N-64 version of Majors has been, this software has been available

for a long time. When you loaded up the Majores Mask randomizer, first of all, you have to have like, you know, the right file for the game that you put into it for it to kind of chop and screw. But then there's like tons of settings, right? So you can turn on, logic is on by default, right? And that just means like

it's not going to put the hook shot behind a thing you need the hook shot for, right? Everything is solvable. But you can check box, like, I actually know how to do this glitch. Oh. I can do the bomb jump to get over the bridge. And so logic will then bend to say, like, okay, well, if you know how to do that thing, then we can move some stuff around.

Like, it's incredibly granular. Yeah. You can turn on things like when I do the stream, I will probably turn on this setting where you can choose which checks, which is like the word that they use for like when you find an item, it is a check. You can choose which checks are going to have guaranteed junk, like five rupees. You can make it so I don't have to do all the cafe and Andrew side quest stuff. because I know it's going to give garbage

and you can pick and choose exactly what it's what it's going to do. So it's like it's very detailed and very, very cool. I thought about doing it for Eldon Ring. Seems like a fun one to do it. Yeah, so the reason I really like Zelda for it. Okay, there's like, there's a whole suite

of randomizer tools called archipelica. Are you guys familiar with this at all? What it allows you to do is set up a multi-world, which is basically you have a server and the server multiple users are logged into at a time they are playing different randomized games that are all being piped

through this server and you can find items from one game in another game. What? So this exists already in a mashup of Link to the Past in Super Metroid. I saw this like a few years ago. So you could find the screw attack

in Link to the Past? Yes, right? And also like you would go through a door in, you know, Cornaria and it exits out of the Fortune Tellers shop at Lake Highlia. So, like, that existed. But now Archipelago is this software and platform where you can do that with fucking like, like, Hollow Night and Pokemon Red and Blue and Microsoft Paint. There's, like, checks in Microsoft Paint. You have to copy an image only, like, you have no tools. And so as you get closer to getting the image right, your canvas gets bigger and you get more. Like, there's all that stuff.

It is, that stuff is really, really, I think, kind of challenging to stream maybe from my somewhat rookie position. But like, this world of randomizers is fucking gargantuan. And you can do a ton of crazy stuff with it. And it really is like I've beaten a Okarina of times, maybe a dozen times, probably more, honestly, throughout my life. I used to speed run it with my buddy Clint. Playing it in this way was like a completely different experience. It is a completely different experience to find something and be like, well, shit, I guess I'm starting with the Spirit Temple. Like, it really is interesting. And I'm really excited to do it with a game like Majora's Mask, where there is, you know, you have the Bombers Notebook and like all of the side quests and like having that tool to kind of like help track stuff.

Yeah. So, yes, I have been playing Majors Mass 3D with the restoration patch. And it has been really incredible. Very, very cool, very weird game. And I think Gretzo's 3DS Zelda remorse. makes are like absolute top tier great shit yeah i'm looking forward to some of these actually coming to switch i would imagine they will eventually uh just because a lot of people don't have their 3ds lying around yeah it looks great by the way running on my computer i'm sure i should maybe shouldn't but running on my computer with the restoration mod like it looks fucking great i do have a copy i have a copy of major's mask on n64 and on fucking 3d s 3d s wow boom i got the holographic gold on that looks nice

This is where we need video. I got the nasty-ass faded gray Zelda Ocrie of Time Cartridge because my dumb-ass brother gave my gold version to his ex-fiance. What a butthole. Was that how he proposed? Yeah, he gave her my gold Zelda Akria

of Time cartridge. I'll never forgive his ass for that. Do you have a Bandra Kazui copy back there? No, I got smashed, MyCart, My 64, and Mischief Makers. No yellow. Do you go Donkey Kong 64? No, I don't have it.

You're going to want to go get a Banjo Cazui because you're going to want to play Banjo Recompiled on PC ASAP because it's absolutely sick. That is what I have been playing as my bonus this week. It is a native PC build of Banjo Cazooey that takes about 30 seconds to get running and also launched alongside two huge mods

including an ocarina of time mod for Banjo Cazui. It looks bonkers. It is wild how good these native versions of Nintendo 64 games look on PC. They are truly stunning. And yeah, if you have a copy of it, I recommend you go and check this one out because a solid game. You know, it's not, it's not Mario 64. but it is still pretty damn good.

It's also much less of a lift than running an N64 emulators running these recompiled games. So you'll see a lot of these games running on like relatively crappy handhelds through Portmaster and like I was playing like Mary 64 at 60 FPS like running great. There's a there's an Ocarina of Time

sort of version called the Ship of Harkinian that is like a huge, fan project that like a ton of work and love and effort has gone into and there is also a version of Majors Mass called two ship two Harkini which is really really very good yeah I'm so fascinated I'm so fascinated by that world um hey thank you so much for listening to the besties I had a great time with you guys me too Justin um but it was fun talking about Cairn and perfect tides tides tides shit what's it called fuck uh Station to Station?

Perfect Tide Station to Station is the full name. What else did we talk about Chris Plant? What else do we talk about? I mean, we talked about Cairn. We talked about Majora's Mask. We talked about Archipelago.g.g. We talked about Taskmaster Live. We didn't talk about how, if you want to hear more about Perfect Tide Station to Station,

you could listen to an interview with its creator on Post Games. But now we have talked about that. A little plug in there. Maybe we did. I love that. Can I get a plug in there for the Patreon? Our Patreon. Please.

We don't care about your patron, Chris Plant. Whatever. I mean, it helps me too. I'm not going to complain. That's true. It is patreon.com slash the besties. And we have some members to thank. We have Brendan W.

We have Alexander T. We have Drowrin and we have Evan. Thank you for being members. We have a new bracket battles episode coming out on Tuesday. That'll be exciting. We've got new resties coming every other week and all good stuff. Okay, plant. You can you can you could drop in your post dash games. What is it? Oh, sure. I mean, I already did that. Postdoc games. You can go do that. But I want to talk about the game we have next week because I had a professor in college of my capstone ethics class.

Yes. Who about three weeks out from the capstone paper being due sat the class down and said, if you have not started your paper, you need to drop this class. It is too late. It is too late for you to do this paper. time for the due date for the assignment. I defied him, and I did fucking cram that shit into like three intense sleepless nights. But I will say, folks, if you haven't started playing Dragon Quest 7, it is too late for you to participate in next week's discussion. Griffin, this is a gift that you've given me that maybe dwarfs any other gift that you've ever given me.

Griffin, I think it might just be me and you for that segment. Correct. Listen, Dragon Quest 7 is what we're talking about. the remake. It is freaking RPG comfort food, baby.

We're going to be talking about that and other stuff. There's actually a few sort of embargoes that go up next week. So it'll be

action-packed but, you know, Dragon Quest 7 is going to be the raison de. Yes. I think it's fair to assume that

Justin and I will be doing something else. Yes. And that's okay. Chris and I, dirty dogs in the trenches.

Right. With our slimes. Our J.R. Fresh. You'll be closer to the journalism

seminar that I had in college where my friend Colin and I went and did once the death charge is the politically correct term for the drink. I did death charges two back to

the Guinness with a shot of Bailey's that one. Yeah and then went to this class showed up a reeking of booze showed up 30 minutes late. The professor sat us down from the whole class and he said everyone pull out paper, pull out pencil we're writing a essay right now.

It's going to be very important towards your grade. Except for you too. You don't get to write the essay. You both get A's, and everybody else gets to learn that this is how life actually works. Oh my God. That's cool.

I mean, it sucks for everyone, and it sucks probably the optics of that for you. But cool that you didn't have to write the paper. It was great. You're learning the wrong lesson. You're learning the worst possible lesson. Not ethics class.

I was toasted enough that it didn't bother me at all. Sure. Oh, yeah, of course. You know? We all had a lot of... He used the word toasted. Yeah. We had a lot of fun in college.

And you're going to have a lot of fun listening to us, talk about Dragon Quest 7 and probably playing Dragon Quest 7 if you live that life. So tune in for the besties next week because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!